Congratulations Team100!!! (and Sequoia Robotics ...)

Two of our members are in Atlanta as part of Team100 competing in the 2008 FIRST championship. Team 100 finished second in the Curie bracket!

The Woodside/Carlmont robotics club has been very welcoming to us this year. FIRST is a whole different scale of robotics than what we work on at our meetings. Our members were key contributors to the mechanical and software development.

We're hoping in a year or two to field our own FIRST team, of course keeping close ties to Team100.

Meeting Notes 2008 April 13

We continue to work on mechanical assembly of our 'bots. Members are finding it it every bit as challenging to put the pieces together as to solder the electronics! The cool thing is that the success in learning electronics gives them confidence they can do the mechanical assembly.

No meeting next week. Next post will explain why. Week after that we might finish 'bot assembly.

Meeting Notes 2008 April 06

Spent the day

• finishing solder of components
  
• planning the mounting them onto our cardboard chasis
• soldering an extra boarduino, caps onto motors, and making cables
  

The whisker sensors will be a pain to mount onto the bot. They normally mount by soldering them onto a PC board. But we don't have that. We'll either glue them down, or press fit them into holes or figure something else out.

We would have got more mounted, but I forgot to bring 4-40 hardware to mount a few of the pieces.

Next time we might finish construction. Then it's on to programming.

In a few weeks we may be ready to move on to mini sumo kits.

Thanks Tech Shop!

Just a quick note thanking TechShop - www.techshop.ws - for their sponsorship.

We haven't figured out exactly where it's going long term. For now they give us a place to meet on weekends, and access to small tools. Later we hope to use more of their cool tools, and they seem more than willing for us to do that. We both want this to be a long term relationship, and figure we'll see where the ride takes us.

Meeting Notes 2008 March 30

We're getting close to finishing the mechanical construction of our first two bots. In previous weeks we'd soldered the motor controllers and started on two BBB's.

Today we:

• finished the two BBB's we started last time.
  
• started and finished another BBB (it's nice to have a spare!)
• whisker sensors. Was a pain to get the pin with heatshrink into the spring, but it seems like a fantastic sensor design.
• Selected club officers.

Next week:

• Put the bots together! Everyone should bring a small box.
• Start programming

Sequoia Robotics

The Sequoia Robotics Club started a few months ago. Our first project is a simple bot that will move forward until it bumps into something, backs up, turns, and continues on its way. There were a couple of reasons to choose this simple bot as a first project:

• Demonstrate all the fundamental elements of a bot. By keeping it simple, we can focus on the basics.
• Give everyone a chance to make mistakes as cheaply as possible. When your learning to solder you are bound to fry a board or two. It's a lot better to fry a $15 board than a board that's part of a $100 kit ...
• Make members feel comfortable with stuff we've designed ourselves, rather than kits designed by others. I worried that if the first project we worked on was a robot kit from someone else, that we'd be reluctant to put together a design of our own. Better to start with our own right off that bat.

The bot is put together from a few simple components. It wasn't as cheap as I'd like, but well worth the cost for a simple bot that demonstrates all the basics!

• Control: Modern Device Bare Bones Board, an Arduino clone. A very versatile board! $13
  
• Sensor: Solarbotics "whisker" sensor. $5
  
• Drive Train:
  Motor Controller: Solarbotics L298 Compact Motor Driver. $17.
  Motors: Solarbotics GM8 (2). $12
  Wheels: Solarbotics GM series plastic wheels. $8
• Platform: smallcardboard boxes! FREE ...
• Total cost, about $55.
  

We our Solarbotics stuff locally from Hobby Engineering.

I expect that our next bot will be a Solarbotics "sumovore" with an atmel board. We'll see ...